In modern society, the use of internet content such as webpage access, video streaming, and social networking service (SNS) site access has increased geometrically in a communication network due to an increase in the use of various smart devices including smart phones and tablet personal computers (PCs). Particularly, because of an increase in wireless devices capable of multitasking, an amount of used data in uplink as well as downlink is rapidly increasing at present.
In general, the uplink has more limitations on the use of resources such as a scheduling request or multiple input multiple output (MIMO) support in a cellular radio network such as long term evolution (LTE) compared to the downlink. Accordingly, an available bandwidth for uplink data transmission may be much smaller than that of the downlink even though the uplink data transmission uses a carrier of the same bandwidth as the downlink. Because of asymmetry between the uplink and the downlink, a possibility of the generation of uplink congestion due to an uplink traffic increase gradually becomes higher. The uplink congestion may seriously influence a downlink transmission rate of most web-based Internet applications.
A data transmission scheme of most web-based internet applications corresponds to a transport control protocol (TCP), and a TCP algorithm used by a commercial system such as Linux and Windows may necessarily include a scheme often called acknowledgement (ACK) clocking. Since a new data packet can be transmitted after the ACK is received in ACK-based self-clocking, a transmission rate of a server is automatically controlled according to a bandwidth of a bottleneck and a speed at which the ACK arrives at the server. Therefore, for smooth downlink packet transmission, the uplink ACK needs to arrive at the server at a proper time point.
The above information is presented as background information only to assist with an understanding of the present disclosure. No determination has been made, and no assertion is made, as to whether any of the above might be applicable as prior art with regard to the present disclosure.